Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

by The Ghostway(lit)

  That was inconceivable. So what had happened?

  Had someone else come after Albert Gorman after Lerner had failed to stop him, and found him at Ashie Begay's hogan, and killed them both, and then taken the time for Gorman's ceremonial burial, emptying the hogan and hiding Begay's body? Chee considered that. Possibly. In fact, something like that must have happened. But what would be the motive? He could think of none that made sense.

  Chee circled the hogan yard and then rode east on a sheep trail leading down the arroyo rim. He rode slowly, looking for anything that might deviate in any way from normal. After more than a mile of finding absolutely nothing, he trotted the horse back to the hogan yard. It was snowing more heavily now and the temperature was dropping sharply. The second trail he tried led up past the talus slope, past the place where Gorman's body had been left, and followed under the cliff west of the hogan. It took him into the wind, making the horse reluctant and visibility difficult. He pulled his hatbrim down and rode with head bowed to keep the snowflakes out of his eyes-plodding along studying the ground, knowing what he was looking for without letting the thought take any exact shape in his mind. The snow was sticking, accumulating fast. Soon it would cover everything and make his search futile. He should have done this long ago. Should have used his head. Should have attended his instinctive knowledge that Hosteen Ashie Begay would not have abandoned this place to a ghost, would not have left his nephew half prepared for the journey to the underworld. There was this trail to check out, and at least two more, and there wouldn't be time to do it all before the snow covered everything.

  There almost wasn't time.

  Chee saw the horse without realizing he was seeing anything more than a round boulder coated with snow. But there was something a little wrong with the color where the snow hadn't stuck, a redness that was off-key for the gray granite of this landscape. He pulled up on the reins, and wiped the snowflakes out of his eyebrows, and stared. Then he climbed down out of the saddle. He saw the second horse only when he'd walked down into the trail-side gully to inspect the first one.

  Whoever had shot them had led them both far enough down from the trail so that, if they had both fallen as he must have intended, they would have been out of sight. But the one Chee had seen apparently hadn't cooperated. It was a big bay gelding, and the bullet fired into its fore head apparently had touched off a frantic struggle. It had lunged uphill, two or three bounding reflex jumps judging from the dislodged stones, before its brain turned off in death.

  Hosteen Begay's belongings were dumped out of sight farther down the wash, behind a screen of pi¤ons. Chee sorted through them quickly, identifying bedding, clothing, boxes of cooking utensils, and two sacks of food. Begay's furniture was also here. A kitchen chair, a cot, a light chest of drawers, enough other odds and ends of living to convince Chee that even with two horses hauling, it must have taken more than one trip to move it all here. He stood beside the cache and looked around. This was what he'd expected, had expected since his mind had time to calculate what finding the Four Mountains Bundle had meant. He'd expected it, but it still left him sick. And there was one more thing to be found.

  He found Ashie Begay a bit farther down the wash, his body dumped as unceremoniously as the furniture. Begay had been shot in the head, just like his horses.

  Chapter 23

  It took chee three hours to get his pickup out of the Chuskas. Twice it involved digging through drifts, and twice he had to unload the horse and lead it up slopes where the truck lacked the traction to pull the load. By the time he reached the graded road leading to the Toadlena boarding school he was weary to the bone, with another thirteen miles through the snow to Highway 666 and thirty more to Shiprock. The snow blew steadily from the north-north-west, and he drove northward alternately through a narrow white tunnel formed by his headlights reflecting off the driven flakes and brief blinding oblivions of ground blizzards. His radio told him that Navajo Route 1 was closed from Shiprock south to Kayenta, and Navajo Route 3 was closed from Two Story to Keams Canyon, and that U.S. 666 was closed from Mancos Creek, Colorado, to Gallup, New Mexico. That helped explain why Chee's pickup truck had the highway to itself. He drove about twenty-five miles an hour, slowing as well as he could when he sensed the ground blizzards coming, his fingers sensitive to traction under his wheels and his shoulder muscles aching with fatigue. He'd covered the body of Hosteen Ashie Begay with Begay's bedroll, thinking that he, like Gorman, had had to make his journey into the underworld with his hair unwashed-without even the imperfect preparations Gorman's corpse had received. But the man who killed him had at least sent along with Begay the spirits of his horses. Had he known that sacrifice of the owner's horse had been an ancient Navajo custom? Possibly. But Chee had no illusions that this was why the horses had been killed. They were killed for the same reason Begay was killed, and his hogan emptied, and Gorman's corpse prepared for burial-a great deal of trouble to make it seem that nothing unusual had happened at Begay's hogan. But why? Why? Why?

  There seemed to Chee to be little enough mystery about who the killer was. It was Vaggan, or some surrogate Vaggan-one of those who, in white society, did such things for pay. But it was probably the man Shaw had identified as Vaggan. This seemed to be his job, whatever its purpose. And it would have been easy enough to learn about Navajo burial customs. They would be covered in any of a half-dozen books available in the Los Angeles library. Anyone who could read could have learned enough to fake what had happened at the Begay hogan. Who had done it didn't matter-Vaggan or someone like him. The question was why.

  Chee was finding he couldn't make his mind work very well. The headache had returned. Fatigue, probably, and eyestrain induced from staring into the reflecting snow. He put Begay's body out of his consciousness and thought only about driving. And finally there to his right was the sign indicating the entrance road to the Shiprock landing strip, and he could feel the highway sloping downward into the San Juan river bottom, and Shiprock was just ahead.

  He turned the horse into the shelter of the tribal barn, and left the horse trailer in the lot, and drove into the village. Across the bridge he hesitated a moment. A left turn at the junction would take him to his trailer home, to hot coffee, food, his bed. To a telephone to report to Captain Largo what he had found. To deal again with the question of why. The postcard would come up again. Inevitably. It lay at the center of all of this. Had, apparently, triggered it. What had been written on that postcard? Chee turned right, downriver toward the place where the aluminum trailer was parked under a cottonwood tree.

  It looked different, somehow, in this storm. Before temperatures had dropped, snow had crusted on the cold aluminum and collected more snow, and cost the trailer its machine-made look. It loomed in Chee's headlights now as a great white shape, tied to the earth by a drift, as natural as a snow-caked boulder and looking as if it had stood below its tree forever. Light glowed from the small windows. Grayson, or somebody, was home. Chee honked the pickup's horn and waited a moment before it occurred to him that Grayson was a city man who wouldn't be aware of this rural custom of giving warning before invading privacy. He turned up his coat collar and stepped out into the blowing snow.

  If Grayson had heard his horn, there was no evidence of it. Chee rapped his knuckles against the aluminum door panel, waited, and rapped again. The wind worked under the bottom of his coat and around the collar and up his pants legs, as cold as death. It reminded Chee of the corpse of Hosteen Ashie Begay lying frozen under the old man's bedroll. And then the voice of Grayson, through the door.

  "Who is it?"

  "It's Chee," Chee shouted. "Navajo Police."

  "What do you want?"

  "We found your uncle's body," Chee said. "Ashie Begay. I need to talk to you."

  Silence. The cold gripped Chee's ankles, numbed his cheeks. Then Grayson's voice shouted, "Come on in."

  The door opened. It opened outward, as trailer doors open to conserve inside space, no more than six inc
hes, and then the wind pushed it shut again. Chee stood a moment, looking at it, wondering what Grayson was doing and finally understanding. Grayson was playing it safe, as a protected witness might be expected to do. He opened the door and stepped in.

  Grayson was sitting behind the table, his back against the wall, examining Chee. Chee shut the door and stood against it, enjoying the warmth and letting Grayson see his hands were empty.

  "You found whose body?" Grayson said. "Where? What happened?"

  Grayson's hands were out of sight beneath the table. Would he have a weapon? Would a protected witness be allowed to have a gun? Perhaps even be encouraged to keep one? Why not?

  "Not far from his hogan," Chee said. "Somebody had shot him."

  Grayson's face registered a kind of dismay. He looked a little older than Chee had remembered, a little more tired. Maybe it was the artificial light. More likely it was Chee's mood. The corner of his mouth pulled back in the beginning of one of those wry clicks of sympathy or surprise or sorrow, but Grayson stopped it. He brought his hands out from under the table, rubbed his face with the right one. The left one lay on the table, limp and empty. "Why would anyone want to kill that old man?" Grayson said.

  "Your uncle," Chee said.

  Grayson stared at him.

  "We know who you are," Chee said. "It saves time if we get that out of the way. You're Leroy Gorman. You're in the Department of Justice Witness Protection Program under the name of Grayson. You're living here under the Grayson name until it's time to go back to Los Angeles to testify in federal court."

  The man who was Leroy Gorman, older brother of Albert Gorman, nephew of Ashie Begay, stared at Chee, his expression blank. And bleak. And Chee thought, What is his real name? His war name? The name his maternal uncle would have given him, privately and secretly when he was a child, the name he would have whispered through the mask at the Yeibichi ceremonial where he changed from boy to man? The name that would label his real identity, that no one would know except those closest to him, what was that? This Los Angeles Navajo doesn't have a war name, Chee thought, because he doesn't have a family. He isn't Dinee. He felt pity for Leroy Gorman. Part of it was fatigue, and part of it was pity for himself.

  "So much for the goddam promises," Leroy Gorman said. "Nobody knows but one guy in the Prosecutor's office and your fbi guardian angel. That's what they tell you. Nobody else. Not the local fuzz. Not nobody, so there's no way it can leak." He rapped his hand sharply on the Formica tabletop. "Who'd they tell? They have something about it on TV? Front page of the Times? On the radio?"

  "They didn't tell anybody as far as I know," Chee said. "The postcard you wrote gave you away. The one you sent to your brother."

  "I didn't write any postcard," Gorman said.

  "Let me see your camera," Chee said.

  "Camera?" Gorman looked surprised. He stood, opened the overhead cabinet behind him, and extracted a camera from its contents. It was a Polaroid model with a flash attachment. Chee inspected it. It was equipped with an automatic tinier.

  "Not exactly a postcard," Chee said. "You set this thing up, and took a picture of yourself and this trailer house, and sent it to your brother.

  Whatever you wrote on it, it caused him to come running out here to Shiprock looking for you. And when Old Man Begay saw it, something on it, or something Albert told him, caused him to send it along to his granddaughter to tell her to stay away."

  Gorman was looking at him, thinking. He shook his head.

  "What did you write on it?" Chee asked.

  "Nothing, really," Gorman said. "I don't remember, exactly. I just figured Al would be worried about me. Just wrote a little note. Like wish you were here."

  "Did you say where 'here' was?"

  "Hell, no," Gorman said.

  "Just a little note," Chee said. "Then what do you think it was that brought your brother running?"

  Gorman thought. He clicked his tongue. "Maybe," he said, "maybe he heard something I need to know about."

  "Like what?" Chee said.

  "I dunno," Gorman said. "Maybe he heard they were looking for me. Maybe he heard they knew where to find me."

  That had a plausible sound. Albert had heard Leroy's hiding place had leaked. When Leroy's card arrived, he'd seen the Shiprock postmark and had hurried here to warn his brother and hadn't quite made it. And then someone had been sent to make sure that Albert Gorman didn't survive his gunshot wound. How had Albert Gorman really died? The coroner had said gunshot wound, which was obvious and what they'd expected, and what they'd have looked for. But if they were looking for something else, what would they have found? That Albert Gorman had been suffocated, or something like that, which didn't show but would hurry the death from the gunshot wound along? Or had whoever had come to the hogan found him already dead and killed Ashie Begay because of what Albert might have told him? It didn't really matter. Chee's head ached, his eyes burned. He was thinking maybe Albert Gorman died outside the hogan after all. Maybe he hadn't stepped through the corpse hole into a chindi hogan. Maybe he wasn't contaminated with ghost sickness. But that didn't matter either. The ghost sickness came when he made the step-out of hozro and into the darkness. Out of being a Navajo, into being a white man. For Chee, that was where the sickness lay.

  "Any idea who killed him," Leroy Gorman asked, "or why?"

  "No," Chee said. "Do you?"

  Gorman was slumped back in his chair, his hands on the table in front of him, looking over them at nothing. He sighed, and the wind outside picked up enough to remind them both of the storm. "Could be just meanness," Gorman said. He sighed again. "Did you find that girl?"

  "Not exactly," Chee said.

  "I don't guess she'll be coming here," Gorman said. "Didn't you say her grandfather told her to stay away? Something dangerous?"

  "Yeah," Chee said. "But it didn't stop her the first time."

  "What did he tell her?" Gorman was still looking past his hands, his eyes on the door. The wind pressed against it, letting in the cold. "She know I'm a car thief?"

  "I don't know what he told her," Chee said. "I intend to find out."

  "She's kinfolk of mine," Gorman said. "I don't have many. Not much family. Just Al and me. Dad run off and our mother was sickly and we never got to know nobody. She's my niece, isn't she? Begay's granddaughter. That'd be my mother's sister. I knew she had one out here somewhere. I remember she mentioned that. Wonder if that aunt of mine would still be alive. Wonder where that little girl went."

  Chee didn't comment. He wanted a cup of coffee badly. And food, and sleep. He tried to think of what else he could ask this man, what he could possibly learn that would keep this from being just another in a long line of dead ends. He could think of nothing.

  "I'd like to get acquainted with her," Leroy Gorman said. "Meet her family. I didn't make much of a white man. Maybe when I get through with all this I could make some sort of Navajo. You know where I could find the Sosi family?"

  Chee shook his head. He got up and thanked Leroy Gorman for his time and went through the aluminum door into the driving snow, leaving Gorman sitting there looking at his hands, his face full of thought.

  Chapter 24

  He called largo from his trailer while the coffee perked and told the captain what he had found at Begay's hogan. It took Largo something like a micromillisecond to get over his sleepiness and then he was full of questions, not all of which Chee could answer. Finally that part of it was over, and it was a little after 2 a.m. and Chee was full of hot coffee, and two sandwiches, and in bed, and asleep almost before he could appreciate the sound of the winter outside.

  He awoke with the sun on his face. The storm had moved fast, as early winter storms tend to move in the Mountain West, and had left in its wake a cold, bright stillness. Chee took his time. He warmed himself some leftover mutton stew for his breakfast and ate it with corn tortillas and refried beans. He ate slowly and a lot, because he had a lot to do and a long way to go, and whether or not he had anoth
er hot meal this day would depend on road conditions. He put on his thermal underwear, his wool socks, the boots he used for mud. He made sure that his tire chains were in the box behind the seat in his pickup, that his shovel, his hand winch, and his tow chain were in their proper places. He stopped at the gas station beside the San Juan bridge and topped off his gas tank and made sure the auxiliary tank was also full. And then he drove westward out of Shiprock to find Frank Sam Nakai. Nakai was his teacher, his friend since earliest boyhood, and, most important of all in the Navajo scheme of things, the brother of his mother-his key clan uncle.

  The first seventy miles, through Teec Nos Pos, Red Mesa, Mexican Water, and Dennehotso, was easy enough going over the snow-packed asphalt of Route 504. Beyond Dennehotso, reaching the winter hogan of Frank Sam Nakai involved turning southward off the highway on a dirt road that wandered across Greasewood Flats, dipped across the usually dry Tyende Creek Canyon, and then climbed Carson Mesa. Five miles down this doubtful route, Chee decided it wasn't going to work. The air was still cold but the hot sun was turning the snow pack into mush. He had put his chains on before he left the highway, but even with them, the truck slipped and slid. As the day wore on it would get steadily worse until sundown froze it all again. He made it back to the highway and made the hundred-mile circle back through Mexican Water and southward to Round Rock and Many Farms and Chinle, and then the long, slippery way to the south side of Black Mesa past the Cottonwood Day School and through Blue Gap, to an old road which led to Tah Chee Wash. It was as bad as the road south from Dennehotso but, from where the passable stretch ended near Blue Gap, much shorter. Chee drove down it in second, at a cautious ten miles an hour. He'd drive as far as the melting snow would allow, walk in the remaining miles, and walk out again when the cold darkness turned the snow into ice and the mud into frozen iron.